Just a short post to let you know about my plans for training for the first part of this year.

I’ll be teaching the 5-day Advanced Distributed Systems Design course on the week of March 24-28 in London. Registration is currently open here.

I’ve also decided to come back to New York City and teach the course there on the week of May 12-16. Registration isn’t open just yet but if you’d like to reserve a spot, send me an email to training@udidahan.com.

You might have also heard some whispering of an NServiceBus conference – that too will be coming this year.

If you’d asked me last year how long I saw myself jetting around the world giving my SOA course, I probably would have said that I could see myself doing this well into “retirement”. But things change – usually when you least expect it.

In any case, I’ll be giving the course 4 more times, and that’ll be it.

When I was in Denver last month, I had the SOA course professionally recorded so if you can’t make any of these dates, you’ll still be able to get the videos. If you bought the videos in the past, don’t worry, I’ll be getting you the new videos as soon as they’re available. The NServiceBus courses delivered by other trainers will continue to run the same as before.

This change is part of a larger change in priorities for me. There are some big things coming that I’m very excited about that require quite a bit more of my attention.

Anyway, hope to see you either in Oslo, New York, Stockholm, or London.

Occasionally I’ll get questions from people who have been going down the CQRS path about why I’m so against data duplication. Aren’t the performance benefits of a denormalized view model justified, they ask. This is even more pronounced in geographically distributed systems where the “round-trip” may involve going outside your datacenter over a relatively slow link to another site.

CQRS

As his been said several times before by many others, it’s not the denormalized view model that defines CQRS.

One of the things that sometimes surprising people after going through my course is that in most cases you don’t need a denormalized view model, or at least, not the kind you think. Yes, that’s right: MOST cases.

But I don’t want to get too deep into the CQRS thing in this post – that can wait.

SOA

The big thing I’m against is raw business data being duplicated between services.

Data that can be expected to be accessible in multiple services includes things like identifiers, status information, and date-times. These date-times are used to anchor the status changes in time so that our system will behave correctly even if data/messages are processed out of order. Not all status information necessarily needs to be anchored in time explicitly – sometimes this can be implicit to the context of a given flow through the system.

For example, the Amazon.com checkout workflow.

In that flow, if you provide a shipping address that is in the US, you are presented with one set of options for shipping speed, whereas an international address will lead you to a different set of options.

Assuming that the address information of the customer and the shipping speed options are in different services, we need to propagate the status InternationalAddress(true/false) between these services in that same flow. In this case, there isn’t a need to explicitly anchor that status in time.

But what’s so bad about duplication of data between services?

The danger is that functionality ultimately follows raw business data.

You start with something small like having product prices in the catalog service, the order service, and the invoice service. Then, when you get requirements around supporting multiple currencies, you now need to implement that logic in multiple places, or create a shared library that all the services depend on.

These dependencies creep up on you slowly, tying your shoelaces together, gradually slowing down the pace of development, undermining the stability of your codebase where changes to one part of the system break other parts. It’s a slow death by a thousand cuts, and as a result nobody is exactly sure what big decision we made that caused everything to go so bad.

That’s the thing, it wasn’t viewed as a “big decision” but rather as just one “pragmatic choice” for that specific case. The first one excuses the second, which paves the way for third, and from that point on, it’s a “pattern” – how we do things around here; the proverbial slippery slope.

So what’s with the word “Replication” in the title of this post?

While data duplication between services is very dangerous, replication of business data WITHIN a service is perfectly alright.

Let’s get back into multi-site scenarios, like a retail chain that has a headquarters (HQ) and many stores. Prices are pushed out from the HQ and orders are pushed back from the stores according to some schedule.

We know that we can’t guarantee a perfect connection between all stores and the HQ at all times, therefore we copy the prices published from the HQ and store them locally in the store. Also, since we want to perform top-level analytics on the orders made at the various stores, that would be best done by having all of those orders copied locally at the HQ as well.

We should not view this movement of data from one physical location to another as duplication, but rather as replication done for performance reasons. If there were some magical always-on zero-latency network that existed, we wouldn’t need to do any of this replication.

And that’s just the thing – logical boundaries should not be impacted by these types of physical infrastructure choices (generally speaking). Since services are aligned with logical boundaries, we should expect to see them cross physical boundaries – this includes SYSTEM boundaries (since a system is really nothing more than a unit of deployment).

I know that you might be reading that and thinking “What!?” but there isn’t enough time to get into this in any more depth here. You can read some of my previous posts on the topic of SOA for more info here.

Cross-site integration without replication

There are some domains where sensitive data cannot be allowed to “rest” just anywhere. Let’s look at a healthcare environment where we’re integrating data from multiple hospitals and care providers. While all of these partners are interested in working together to make sure that patients get the best care, which means that they need to share their data with each other, they don’t want any of THEIR data to remain at any partner sites afterwards (and are quite adamant about this).

In these cases, the decision was made that performance is less important than data ownership. Personally, I don’t agree with this mindset. The fact that data is “at rest” in a location as opposed to “in flight” does not change ownership. It could be stored in an encrypted manner so that only a certain application could use it, resulting in the same overall effect, but this is an argument that I’ve never won.

People (as physical beings) put a great deal of emphasis on the physical locations of things. It’s understandable but quite counterproductive when dealing with the more abstract domain of software.

In closing

By virtue of the fact that we don’t duplicate raw business data between services, that means that the regular data structures inside a service already look very different from what they would have looked like in a traditional layered architecture with an ORM-persisted entity model.

In fact, you probably wouldn’t see very many relationships between entities at all.

Going beyond that, you probably wouldn’t see the same entities you had before. An Order wouldn’t exist the way you expect; addresses (billing and shipping) would be stored (indexed by OrderID) in one service whereas the shipping speed (also indexed by OrderId) would be in another, and the prices may well be in yet another.

It is in this manner that data does not end up being duplicated between services, but rather is composed by many services whether that is in the UI of one system, the print-outs down by a second system, or in the integration with 3rd parties done by a third system.

If performance needs to be improved, look at having these services replicate their data from one physical system to another – in-memory caching is one way of doing this, denormalized view models might be though of as another (until you realize there isn’t very much normalization within a service to begin with).

And a word from our sponsor

For those of you on “rewrite that big-ball-of-mud” projects looking to use these principles, I strongly suggest coming on one of my courses. The next one is in San Francisco and I’ve just opened up the registration for Miami.

For those of you on the other side of the Atlantic, the next courses will be in Stockholm in October and in London this December.

The schedule for next year is also coming together and it will include South Africa and Australia too.

Anyway, here’s what one attendee had to say after taking the course earlier this month:

I wanted to thank you for the excellent workshop in Toronto last week. I spent the better part of the weekend reflecting over what was presented, the insights we learned through the group exercises, and how my preconceptions of SOA have changed. By the end of the course, all the tidbits of (usually) rather ambiguous information that I’ve collected from various blogs, books, and other sources, finally coalesced into something more intelligible – one big A-HA moment if you will. Overall, I found the content of the workshop to be incredibly enlightening and it left me feeling invigorated and excited to learn more.- Joel from Canada

Hope you’ll be able to make it.

If travel is out of the question for you, you can also look at get a recording of the course here.

One final thing

If your employer won’t foot the bill for these, please get in touch with me.
I wouldn’t want you not to be able to come just because you’re paying out of pocket.

Although the prices has gone up a bit to meet the rates of my training partners, I’m including the video recording of the course in the price so that you’ll have a complete reference to go back to after the course is over.

I’m happy to announce that I will be coming to Norway this March to give a 3 day course in cooperation with Program Utvikling.

Here’s the info:

Scalability is the watch-word of enterprise development. With increasing numbers of users, performing more complex tasks involving more data, collaborating with each other inside the organization and across the internet, almost all enterprise systems are being distributed to more machines, and even to data-centres across the globe. With the increased size of these systems, more developers, testers, architects, and administrators are required to bring them to production and operate them.

This 3–day course will equip you with skills in service–oriented architecture & design, transaction management, reliability & robustness, high availability & capacity planning, as well as many other design principles and practices key to tackling large-scale enterprise projects.

On top of learning how to handle the technical complexities of building enterprise–class systems, you will see the use of Domain-Driven Design and other business analysis techniques needed to decompose large intricate business domains into smaller, more manageable sub–domains. You’ll also see how to balance data–consistency and data freshness against costs as well as how to work with stakeholders to uncover the cost-effective level of each non-functional requirement.

By the end of this course you will be able to:

Avoid common pitfalls in distributed systems

Use loosely coupled messaging communication

Identify and allocated business logic to services

Decompose services into layers, tiers, assemblies, and processes

Design for service management and monitoring in production environments

So, I’ve started thinking what else should be included so that you get the most out of them.

Here’s what I’ve currently got in mind:

All the powerpoint presentations

Full source and samples of nServiceBus so you can run the code as I talk about it

4 hours of online consultation so you can get up to speed quickly in applying these principles and practices to your project

If you have anything else in mind that you think will help, please drop me a comment below.

So far, 32 people have expressed interest in getting this and it looks like I should be able to handle up to about 40 in a timely manner with my current setup. I hadn’t originally thought about corporate licensing, but since there have been some requests (so that all employees can use the information freely, get copies of the DVD’s, etc), I’ll be doing that too. If you’ve already left a comment about your interest in the DVD’s, I’ll assume you want the personal option. If you want to change that to the corporate option, please leave a comment either here or on the previous post.

Pricing

Ayende mentioned that the guys from Dot Net Rocks are selling Sharepoint training for about $700 per developer for a day of training. I really don’t know how much to charge for this – the guys in Australia paid quite a bit and I wouldn’t want them to feel – well, like you feel when you find out that the guy sitting next to you on the plane paid half what you did for his ticket; especially given that they’ve done so much of the production work on the DVD’s (Simon, Brad – you guys are my heroes. I really couldn’t do this without you).

So, I figure that I’ll hear what you guys think that the package is worth first. Leave me comment, or send me an email if you’d like more anonymity.

I’d also be interested in hearing what kind of domain you’re thinking about applying this stuff to – I might be able to put you in touch with people already applying SOA and nServiceBus in those areas so you can learn from each other as well.

We brought him on site to give our development staff the 5-day “Advanced Distributed System Design” training. The course profoundly changed our understanding and approach to SOA and distributed systems.

Consider some of the evidence: 1. Months later, developers still make allusions to concepts learned in the course nearly every day 2. One of our developers went home and made her husband (a developer at another company) sign up for the course at a subsequent date/venue 3. Based on what we learned, we’ve made constant improvements to our architecture that have helped us to adapt to our ever changing business domain at scale and speed If you have the opportunity to receive the training, you will make a substantial paradigm shift.

If I were to do the whole thing over again, I’d start the week by playing the clip from the Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the choice between the red and blue pills. Once you make the intellectual leap, you’ll never look at distributed systems the same way.

Beyond the training, we were able to spend some time with Udi discussing issues unique to our business domain. Because Udi is a rare combination of a big picture thinker and a low level doer, he can quickly hone in on various issues and quickly make good (if not startling) recommendations to help solve tough technical issues.” November 11, 2010

Ian Robinson, Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks
"Your blog and articles have been enormously useful in shaping, testing and refining my own approach to delivering on SOA initiatives over the last few years. Over and against a certain 3-layer-application-architecture-blown-out-to- distributed-proportions school of SOA, your writing, steers a far more valuable course."

Shy Cohen, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft
“Udi is a world renowned software architect and speaker. I met Udi at a conference that we were both speaking at, and immediately recognized his keen insight and razor-sharp intellect. Our shared passion for SOA and the advancement of its practice launched a discussion that lasted into the small hours of the night.It was evident through that discussion that Udi is one of the most knowledgeable people in the SOA space. It was also clear why – Udi does not settle for mediocrity, and seeks to fully understand (or define) the logic and principles behind things.Humble yet uncompromising, Udi is a pleasure to interact with.”

Glenn Block, Senior Program Manager - WCF at Microsoft
“I have known Udi for many years having attended his workshops and having several personal interactions including working with him when we were building our Composite Application Guidance in patterns & practices. What impresses me about Udi is his deep insight into how to address business problems through sound architecture. Backed by many years of building mission critical real world distributed systems it is no wonder that Udi is the best at what he does. When customers have deep issues with their system design, I point them Udi's way.”

Karl Wannenmacher, Senior Lead Expert at Frequentis AG
“I have been following Udi’s blog and podcasts since 2007. I’m convinced that he is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced people in the field of SOA, EDA and large scale systems.
Udi helped Frequentis to design a major subsystem of a large mission critical system with a nationwide deployment based on NServiceBus. It was impressive to see how he took the initial architecture and turned it upside down leading to a very flexible and scalable yet simple system without knowing the details of the business domain.
I highly recommend consulting with Udi when it comes to large scale mission critical systems in any domain.”

Simon Segal, Independent Consultant
“Udi is one of the outstanding software development minds in the world today, his vast insights into Service Oriented Architectures and Smart Clients in particular are indeed a rare commodity. Udi is also an exceptional teacher and can help lead teams to fall into the pit of success. I would recommend Udi to anyone considering some Architecural guidance and support in their next project.”

Ohad Israeli, Chief Architect at Hewlett-Packard, Indigo Division
“When you need a man to do the job Udi is your man! No matter if you are facing near deadline deadlock or at the early stages of your development, if you have a problem Udi is the one who will probably be able to solve it, with his large experience at the industry and his widely horizons of thinking , he is always full of just in place great architectural ideas.
I am honored to have Udi as a colleague and a friend (plus having his cell phone on my speed dial).”

Ward Bell, VP Product Development at IdeaBlade
“Everyone will tell you how smart and knowledgable Udi is ... and they are oh-so-right. Let me add that Udi is a smart LISTENER. He's always calibrating what he has to offer with your needs and your experience ... looking for the fit. He has strongly held views ... and the ability to temper them with the nuances of the situation.I trust Udi to tell me what I need to hear, even if I don't want to hear it, ... in a way that I can hear it. That's a rare skill to go along with his command and intelligence.”

Eli Brin, Program Manager at RISCO Group
“We hired Udi as a SOA specialist for a large scale project. The development is outsourced to India. SOA is a buzzword used almost for anything today. We wanted to understand what SOA really is, and what is the meaning and practice to develop a SOA based system.
We identified Udi as the one that can put some sense and order in our minds. We started with a private customized SOA training for the entire team in Israel. After that I had several focused sessions regarding our architecture and design.
I will summarize it simply (as he is the software simplist): We are very happy to have Udi in our project. It has a great benefit. We feel good and assured with the knowledge and practice he brings. He doesn’t talk over our heads. We assimilated nServicebus as the ESB of the project. I highly recommend you to bring Udi into your project.”

Catherine Hole, Senior Project Manager at the Norwegian Health Network
“My colleagues and I have spent five interesting days with Udi - diving into the many aspects of SOA. Udi has shown impressive abilities of understanding organizational challenges, and has brought the business perspective into our way of looking at services. He has an excellent understanding of the many layers from business at the top to the technical infrstructure at the bottom. He is a great listener, and manages to simplify challenges in a way that is understandable both for developers and CEOs, and all the specialists in between.”

Yoel Arnon, MSMQ Expert
“Udi has a unique, in depth understanding of service oriented architecture and how it should be used in the real world, combined with excellent presentation skills. I think Udi should be a premier choice for a consultant or architect of distributed systems.”

Vadim Mesonzhnik, Development Project Lead at Polycom
“When we were faced with a task of creating a high performance server for a video-tele conferencing domain we decided to opt for a stateless cluster with SQL server approach. In order to confirm our decision we invited Udi.

After carefully listening for 2 hours he said: "With your kind of high availability and performance requirements you don’t want to go with stateless architecture."

One simple sentence saved us from implementing a wrong product and finding that out after years of development. No matter whether our former decisions were confirmed or altered, it gave us great confidence to move forward relying on the experience, industry best-practices and time-proven techniques that Udi shared with us.
It was a distinct pleasure and a unique opportunity to learn from someone who is among the best at what he does.”

I would strongly recommend this course to anyone with an interest in how to develop IT systems which provide immediate and future fitness for purpose. An influential and innovative thought leader and practitioner in his field, Udi demonstrates and shares a phenomenally in depth knowledge that proves his position as one of the premier experts in his field globally.

The course has enhanced my knowledge and skills in ways that I am able to immediately apply to provide benefits to my employer. Additionally though I will be able to build upon what I learned in my 2 days with Udi and have no doubt that it will only enhance my future career.

He accompanied us in all stages of our development cycle and helped us put vision into real life distributed scalable software. He brought fresh thinking, great in depth of understanding software, and ongoing support that proved as valuable and cost effective.

Udi has the unique ability to analyze the business problem and come up with a simple and elegant solution for the code and the business alike.With Udi's attention to details, and knowledge we avoided pit falls that would cost us dearly.”

Børge Hansen, Architect Advisor at Microsoft
“Udi delivered a 5 hour long workshop on SOA for aspiring architects in Norway. While keeping everyone awake and excited Udi gave us some great insights and really delivered on making complex software challenges simple. Truly the software simplist.”

Motty Cohen, SW Manager at KorenTec Technologies
“I know Udi very well from our mutual work at KorenTec. During the analysis and design of a complex, distributed C4I system - where the basic concepts of NServiceBus start to emerge - I gained a lot of "Udi's hours" so I can surely say that he is a professional, skilled architect with fresh ideas and unique perspective for solving complex architecture challenges. His ideas, concepts and parts of the artifacts are the basis of several state-of-the-art C4I systems that I was involved in their architecture design.”

We’d been meaning to delve into messaging at Eleutian after multiple discussions with and blog posts from Greg Young and Udi Dahan in the past. We weren’t entirely sure where to start, how to start, what tools to use, how to use them, etc. Being able to sit in a room with Udi for an entire week while he described exactly how, why and what he does to tackle a massive enterprise system was invaluable to say the least.

We now have a much better direction and, more importantly, have the confidence we need to start introducing these powerful concepts into production at Eleutian.”

Gad Rosenthal, Department Manager at Retalix
“A thinking person. Brought fresh and valuable ideas that helped us in architecting our product. When recommending a solution he supports it with evidence and detail so you can successfully act based on it. Udi's support "comes on all levels" - As the solution architect through to the detailed class design. Trustworthy!”

Chris Bilson, Developer at Russell Investment Group
“I had the pleasure of attending a workshop Udi led at the Seattle ALT.NET conference in February 2009. I have been reading Udi's articles and listening to his podcasts for a long time and have always looked to him as a source of advice on software architecture.When I actually met him and talked to him I was even more impressed. Not only is Udi an extremely likable person, he's got that rare gift of being able to explain complex concepts and ideas in a way that is easy to understand.All the attendees of the workshop greatly appreciate the time he spent with us and the amazing insights into service oriented architecture he shared with us.”

Alexey Shestialtynov, Senior .Net Developer at Candidate Manager
“I met Udi at Candidate Manager where he was brought in part-time as a consultant to help the company make its flagship product more scalable. For me, even after 30 years in software development, working with Udi was a great learning experience. I simply love his fresh ideas and architecture insights.As we all know it is not enough to be armed with best tools and technologies to be successful in software - there is still human factor involved. When, as it happens, the project got in trouble, management asked Udi to step into a leadership role and bring it back on track. This he did in the span of a month. I can only wish that things had been done this way from the very beginning.I look forward to working with Udi again in the future.”

Christopher Bennage, President at Blue Spire Consulting, Inc.
“My company was hired to be the primary development team for a large scale and highly distributed application. Since these are not necessarily everyday requirements, we wanted to bring in some additional expertise. We chose Udi because of his blogging, podcasting, and speaking. We asked him to to review our architectural strategy as well as the overall viability of project.
I was very impressed, as Udi demonstrated a broad understanding of the sorts of problems we would face. His advice was honest and unbiased and very pragmatic. Whenever I questioned him on particular points, he was able to backup his opinion with real life examples.
I was also impressed with his clarity and precision. He was very careful to untangle the meaning of words that might be overloaded or otherwise confusing. While Udi's hourly rate may not be the cheapest, the ROI is undoubtedly a deal.
I would highly recommend consulting with Udi.”

Robert Lewkovich, Product / Development Manager at Eggs Overnight
“Udi's advice and consulting were a huge time saver for the project I'm responsible for. The $ spent were well worth it and provided me with a more complete understanding of nServiceBus and most importantly in helping make the correct architectural decisions earlier thereby reducing later, and more expensive, rework.”

The class was very well put together. The materials were clear and concise and Udi did a fantastic job presenting it. It was a good mixture of lecture, coding, and question and answer. I fully expected that I would be taking notes like crazy, but it was so well laid out that the only thing I wrote down the entire course was what I wanted for lunch. Udi provided us with all the lecture materials and everyone has access to all of the samples which are in the nServiceBus trunk.

Now I know why Udi is the "Software Simplist." I was amazed to find that all the code and solutions were indeed very simple. The patterns that Udi presented keep things simple by isolating complexity so that it doesn't creep into your day to day code. The domain code looks the same if it's running in a single process or if it's running in 100 processes.”

Ian Cooper, Team Lead at Beazley
“Udi is one of the leaders in the .Net development community, one of the truly smart guys who do not just get best architectural practice well enough to educate others but drives innovation. Udi consistently challenges my thinking in ways that make me better at what I do.”

Liron Levy, Team Leader at Rafael
“I've met Udi when I worked as a team leader in Rafael. One of the most senior managers there knew Udi because he was doing superb architecture job in another Rafael project and he recommended bringing him on board to help the project I was leading.Udi brought with him fresh solutions and invaluable deep architecture insights. He is an authority on SOA (service oriented architecture) and this was a tremendous help in our project.On the personal level - Udi is a great communicator and can persuade even the most difficult audiences (I was part of such an audience myself..) by bringing sound explanations that draw on his extensive knowledge in the software business. Working with Udi was a great learning experience for me, and I'll be happy to work with him again in the future.”

Adam Dymitruk, Director of IT at Apara Systems
“I met Udi for the first time at DevTeach in Montreal back in early 2007. While Udi is usually involved in SOA subjects, his knowledge spans all of a software development company's concerns. I would not hesitate to recommend Udi for any company that needs excellent leadership, mentoring, problem solving, application of patterns, implementation of methodologies and straight out solution development.There are very few people in the world that are as dedicated to their craft as Udi is to his. At ALT.NET Seattle, Udi explained many core ideas about SOA. The team that I brought with me found his workshop and other talks the highlight of the event and provided the most value to us and our organization. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to recommend him.”

Eytan Michaeli, CTO Korentec
“Udi was responsible for a major project in the company, and as a chief architect designed a complex multi server C4I system with many innovations and excellent performance.”

Carl Kenne, .Net Consultant at Dotway AB
“Udi's session "DDD in Enterprise apps" was truly an eye opener. Udi has a great ability to explain complex enterprise designs in a very comprehensive and inspiring way. I've seen several sessions on both DDD and SOA in the past, but Udi puts it in a completly new perspective and makes us understand what it's all really about. If you ever have a chance to see any of Udi's sessions in the future, take it!”

Avi Nehama, R&D Project Manager at Retalix
“Not only that Udi is a briliant software architecture consultant, he also has remarkable abilities to present complex ideas in a simple and concise manner, and... always with a smile. Udi is indeed a top-league professional!”

Ben Scheirman, Lead Developer at CenterPoint Energy
“Udi is one of those rare people who not only deeply understands SOA and domain driven design, but also eloquently conveys that in an easy to grasp way. He is patient, polite, and easy to talk to. I'm extremely glad I came to his workshop on SOA.”

Scott C. Reynolds, Director of Software Engineering at CBLPath
“Udi is consistently advancing the state of thought in software architecture, service orientation, and domain modeling.
His mastery of the technologies and techniques is second to none, but he pairs that with a singular ability to listen and communicate effectively with all parties, technical and non, to help people arrive at context-appropriate solutions.
Every time I have worked with Udi, or attended a talk of his, or just had a conversation with him I have come away from it enriched with new understanding about the ideas discussed.”

Rhys Campbell, Owner at Artemis West
“For many years I have been following the works of Udi. His explanation of often complex design and architectural concepts are so cleanly broken down that even the most junior of architects can begin to understand these concepts. These concepts however tend to typify the "real world" problems we face daily so even the most experienced software expert will find himself in an "Aha!" moment when following Udi teachings.
It was a pleasure to finally meet Udi in Seattle Alt.Net OpenSpaces 2008, where I was pleasantly surprised at how down-to-earth and approachable he was. His depth and breadth of software knowledge also became apparent when discussion with his peers quickly dove deep in to the problems we current face. If given the opportunity to work with or recommend Udi I would quickly take that chance. When I think .Net Architecture, I think Udi.”

Sverre Hundeide, Senior Consultant at Objectware
“Udi had been hired to present the third LEAP master class in Oslo. He is an well known international expert on enterprise software architecture and design, and is the author of the open source messaging framework nServiceBus.
The entire class was based on discussion and interaction with the audience, and the only Power Point slide used was the one showing the agenda.
He started out with sketching a naive traditional n-tier application (big ball of mud), and based on suggestions from the audience we explored different solutions which might improve the solution. Whatever suggestions we threw at him, he always had a thoroughly considered answer describing pros and cons with the suggested solution. He obviously has a lot of experience with real world enterprise SOA applications.”

Raphaël Wouters, Owner/Managing Partner at Medinternals
“I attended Udi's excellent course 'Advanced Distributed System Design with SOA and DDD' at Skillsmatter. Few people can truly claim such a high skill and expertise level, present it using a pragmatic, concrete no-nonsense approach and still stay reachable.”

Nimrod Peleg, Lab Engineer at Technion IIT
“One of the best programmers and software engineer I've ever met, creative, knows how to design and implemet, very collaborative and finally - the applications he designed implemeted work for many years without any problems!”

Jose Manuel Beas
“When I attended Udi's SOA Workshop, then it suddenly changed my view of what Service Oriented Architectures were all about. Udi explained complex concepts very clearly and created a very productive discussion environment where all the attendees could learn a lot. I strongly recommend hiring Udi.”

Daniel Jin, Senior Lead Developer at PJM Interconnection
“Udi is one of the top SOA guru in the .NET space. He is always eager to help others by sharing his knowledge and experiences. His blog articles often offer deep insights and is a invaluable resource. I highly recommend him.”

Pasi Taive, Chief Architect at Tieto
“I attended both of Udi's "UI Composition Key to SOA Success" and "DDD in Enterprise Apps" sessions and they were exceptionally good. I will definitely participate in his sessions again. Udi is a great presenter and has the ability to explain complex issues in a manner that everyone understands.”

Eran Sagi, Software Architect at HP
“So far, I heard about Service Oriented architecture all over.
Everyone mentions it – the big buzz word.
But, when I actually asked someone for what does it really mean, no one managed to give me a complete satisfied answer.
Finally in his excellent course “Advanced Distributed Systems”, I got the answers I was looking for.
Udi went over the different motivations (principles) of Services Oriented, explained them well one by one, and showed how each one could be technically addressed using NService bus.
In his course, Udi also explain the way of thinking when coming to design a Service Oriented system.
What are the questions you need to ask yourself in order to shape your system, place the logic in the right places for best Service Oriented system.

I would recommend this course for any architect or developer who deals with distributed system, but not only.
In my work we do not have a real distributed system, but one PC which host both the UI application and the different services inside, all communicating via WCF.
I found that many of the architecture principles and motivations of SOA apply for our system as well. Enough that you have SW partitioned into components and most of the principles becomes relevant to you as well.
Bottom line – an excellent course recommended to any SW Architect, or any developer dealing with distributed system.”